by Romulo Gallegos

The acclaim that Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969) received for his third novel, Doña Barbara, was so great that Venezuela’s ruling dictator, Juan Vicente Gómez, nominated the Caracas-born author to the nation’s senate. Gallegos, however, proudly declined the nomination and departed from Venezuela in self-imposed exile, for to him the Gómez regime was the incarnation of the forces of barbarism that beset Latin America, against which Doña Barbara railed. A leader in Venezuela’s Acción Democrática party, Gallegos supported, in both his political and literary work, the principles of democracy and social justice. His term as elected President of Venezuela in 1948, which lasted less than a year before he was ousted by a military coup, represented one of the few brief interludes of democracy in Venezuelan history.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place